Customer Reviews

Aviator

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I have to disagree with the other two reviewers, enough to prompt me to write my very first review here. The Aviator is a lovely tale set during those early daring days of mail flights in small biplanes. The trips were dangerous, information on weather enroute was minimal, frequently obtained by calling farmers that lived along the route for local weather conditions. No radios, no cockpit instruments for in cloud flights, no cockpit heating and nav instruments but a paper chart and a clock. And no reliable engines (in a modern sense). Business as usual, back then.

The main character is a mail pilot cut off from the world after a bad accident that left him with more guilt than he could bear. And a bad scar in his face to remind him. He didn't have to look at the mirror to be reminded, he just had to see the look on everyone's face when they stared at him. After his soon to be wife left him, he hid from any kind of human contact by spending the most time in the sky as possible, becoming the most eficient and reliable pilot Moravia, the line's manager had.

In comes the little girl, who wanted to see the world like birds do, so she could describe it to her blind grandfather. A little girl with a huge heart and strong personality, that didn't look away in disgust at the first sight of the aviator's scar.

This is a story of a man who, afer being hidden from the world and from any kind of warm human relationships for a long time, finds himself forced to deal with his repressed ability to love and protect, when he crashlands in an remote valey during a winter storm and injures his passenger.

The way that, despite her injuries, the enduring little girl manages to melt the thick ice in his heart and "bring him back into the light" and the dialogs between the two while the aviator reads her mail letters to keep her distracted from the pain and hunger are memorable to me. Overall this is a tender and heart lifting tale.

Together with the amazing "Fate is the Hunter" (an autobiographic tale), I've kept this as one of my favourite aviation stories.

It is 1928. With questionable judgement, the parents of an eleven year old girl are letting her fly to see her grandfather - in a mailplane, in the mail bin, with no seat, no belts, no chute - rather than take the train. For reasons best known to themselves, the pilot and flight ops manager decide to go along with this, though they're aware that her route is the riskiest of their line. Needless to say, something goes wrong, and a forced landing ensues which wrecks the airplane beyond any repair and leaves one person injured. To complicate matters, the pilot had (for good enough reason, or so it seemed) deviated from the usual route and has gone down in mountain terrain, in the American west, in winter. Barring early rescue, (highly unlikely), we know that these twos' life spans can be measured in days.
What a splendid plot to build a book around! A shame that Gann doesn't. Instead, we have such inessentials as a pilot with Lester's face and Dan Roman's tragic past, a one-legged Gafferty from "Blaze of Noon," a timid, self-centered pilot who puts his own safety ahead of others' survival, etc, etc. We really learn little about pilot Jerry, and though he comes across neither as the fictional Dooley or the real-life O'Connor, he's a man we could clearly learn much from. Even more from 11 year old Heather. Alas, we end knowing less about her than the one-legged Moravia.
Given the contacts Gann had in the flying world, it's entirely possible that this story is based on truth. If so, here's hoping we read it someday.

Ernest K. Gann was a "pilot's pilot" and wrote many novels that proved it. This one is set in 1928 and tells the story of a then-modern-day "pony express" rider-a U.S. Mail pilot whose plane goes down in the Rocky Mountains during a bout of bad weather. He also had a passenger on the trip: an intellectual 11-year-old girl traveling to visit relatives, whose parents wanted her to see the world from the air instead of sending her by a safer mode of travel. (Could anything be less safe than riding in a front well of a plane, on top of a bunch of mail sacks, wearing a helmet that's apparently several sizes too big?) They both survive the crash, but she is severely injured. The story of the search for them and how they cope with their situation is fascinating.

Aviation was relatively new in 1928; it was also a whole lot scarier than today and essentially the Wild West in terms of safety. Pilots of that time were truly adventurers. They had no radar; radio contact was rare, as were runways; there was no air traffic control, and no Weather Channel. They had to figure out themselves where they were, based on visible landmarks, past experience and gut instinct. And they did all of this while flying machines that, though beautifully designed for what they were doing, also seem to have been incredibly fragile. Gann had a gift for description, and an obvious love for his subject matter, so this "primitive" world of flight comes alive in his writing. When he described the planes as being made of "wood, fabric and wire" I got a picture in my mind that made my stomach do flip-flops.

As the daughter of a pilot, I've always believed that they fly because they love it and can't imagine doing anything else. To those of us who don't share that lust it can seem a bit insane, and a book like this gives us a glimpse into the minds of these "flyboys." Very well done.

Earnest K. Gann was born in 1910 and myself in 1954 which places me about three generations younger. Oddly my first airplane ride was in Rockland County, NY the same county where he lived and learned to fly back in the 1930's. My life and eventual flying career took me out west and in and out of Washington State's San Juan Islands where Mr. Gann led a pastoral life and my home is now Boise, Idaho area the central location of this novel.

My appreciation for this book is the six degrees of separation coincidences between myself and the author and more importantly that Earnest K. Gann stuck to his craft and wrote this story in the sunset of his life. I suspect his motivation was to present the history of United Airline's humble beginnings as Varney Airlines and to highlight his own intimacy with the terrain in the story. My own local experience confirms that it is obvious that he knew the region quite well both from the air and the ground. Just adjacent to Boise State's Bronco Stadium there is a historical marker celebrating the original sight of the Boise Airport and the founding of United Airlines.

If at times there were facets of the plot that do not reconcile with 2011 safety practices like seat belts etc as a previous reviewer pointed out, we must remember that this was a different time. The moments that the plot is pushed along I forgive based on Gann's previous body of work. This is an author that needs to be appreciated as a genre and not taken one novel at a time. I highly recommend his autobiography "A Hostage to Fortune" for further insight into all of his works.

This isn't Gann's best written book, nor his best story. Get a copy of "Fate Is The Hunter" for a REAL aviation book - - and then you must read that from cover to cover in one go.
"The Aviator" grinds an ax, has a weak plot, but would be good during jury duty I suppose. Gann's war action fiction is what made his name in literature. He WAS a top-notch flier for decades, so he knows about and has flown all the planes he writes of. This one's story line is lame.
Other Gann books of note (besides the ones Hollywood made into movies) are "Gentlemen of Adventure" or "In The Company of Eagles". for a real change of pace read also "Song of the Sirens", a book about Gann's other passion, tall ships and sailing.

Unlike prior Gann books I've read, this story is more about the influence a young girl has on the life of a lonely aviator of a downed plane than it is about the adventure itself. Set in the early days of airmail, the pilot agrees to carry as a passenger in the unheated mail compartment of the plane a young girl. The pilot lives a lonely life, and at first there is no real concern for the person of the girl.

After the plane crashes in a remote area, their fate becomes the same. The pilot's concern for the girl grows. We witness the actions that result from their concern for each other's safety as they try to find their way out of the wilderness in winter. By the conclusion the pilot has opened his heart to emotional connection.

It is a fast read, but when you pick it up be aware that Gann is exploring a different area is his writing. I think it makes the point of the loneliness of the early pilots, but in a roundabout way that I didnot find that appealing.